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The ad revenue part is true but what do you mean by not harvesting data? Mastodon definitely stores your boosts and likes, it just doesn't use that data to recommend more content. And the big difference is of course that it is stored on your instance's server, not a centralized location.
I'm not OP, but yes, that's why I don't use Mastodon or Twitter/X. I really don't like the format.
I tried to give Twitter a fair shake several years ago, and I found it to be a complete waste of my time. So I don't use it, or anything like it. That's also around when I found Reddit, which I found to not be a complete waste of time, and that's why I'm on Lemmy instead of Mastodon. I like following communities, not topics or people.
It's kind of you, but not a huge deal. When I tried it (when there was an initial migration to Mastodon), it was so decentralized that you couldn't really have much of a feed and it was tough to find much of anything.
The secret to Mastodon is to follow hashtags, not people. (It took a while for that feature to mature, which made that difficult earlier on.)
You can follow people too, but with the population there being lower, it generally makes more sense to follow a topic and hide accounts you don't want to see.
Caveat: I don't spend a lot of time on microblogging platforms, Mastodon or otherwise. The above knowledge might be stale, but used present tense to not give the impression the platform is dead.
When it's built around lage aggregators, running which privately is rather hard, there's a bias in favour of centralised, large operators thereof, which mitigates some of the advantages.